Application Of Schemata In The Teaching Of Listening In Junior High Schools

Now in China, there exist some problems in middle school English classroom teaching. In listening classes, teachers apply traditional teaching mode: playing recorders, students listening and checking. Listeners are only viewed as passive receivers. This kind of teaching is far from developing students'listening competence. Most students'listening competence is at a low level.Listening comprehension has traditionally been regarded as a passive process. However, it is an active process. In the listening process, what the listeners want to get is an adequate understanding of what the speakers said and what the speakers meant .To attain this purpose, listeners should utilize their background knowledge and depend on their learning strategies. Active listeners can understand what the speakers said, their particular purpose and attitude with relevant background knowledge.In view of those problems, this paper takes up the guidance of schema theory to study the teaching of listening in junior high schools. Schema theory holds the view that listeners'background knowledge in language involves linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge, and culture background knowledge. Schemata consist of four types: event schemata, contextual schemata, role schemata and content schemata. According to schema theory, there are two ways in the process of listening comprehension, bottom-up process and top-down process. Whether listeners can understand new information depends greatly on how much background knowledge they have activated.Therefore, this paper puts forward inductive schemata, just as a bridge between the new and the known. Students can use it to predict, interpret the incoming information, and finally understand the main idea. This paper also designs a teaching mode and tells us what and how we should do, which aims to improve the teaching of listening and develop students'listening competence.